Evolution of a garden

It is fall, the time I start looking back at pictures, evaluating how the garden did this year, and think about what I want to do next. I've been thinking about my front garden.
Three years ago I bought my house. The day I closed I signed the papers, got my key, drove to the house, and planted crocuses. Sure, there was a window missing and a pile of raccoon feces upstairs, but crocuses come first. One has to have priorities.

We worked in the interior all winter, and come spring, I started on the outside.

One year in, the house has been painted, and gardens are starting.

Every spring I'm glad I put a priority on crocuses.

And come summer, things begin to fill in.

This is, strangely enough, the longest I've gardened in any once place since I moved out a decade ago. I've loved coaxing this garden into being, and am looking forward to helping it continue to grow and mature!

Learning to love what I love

When I started seriously gardening in my teens, all I grew was roses. I wanted those huge, opulent, complex, fragrant flowers. I would flip through catalogs and books, totally absorbed in the incredible close-up images. When my own plants produced their first blooms, I bent down, cradling them in my hands like a lover, their scent, texture, and color filling all my senses. Pure joy.

Then I started getting educated. I read books on garden design, got the my first horticulture degree, and learned about things like foliage and year-round interest. I learned that focusing totally on lovely flowers was a rookie mistake, that “real” garden designers grow plants with leaves and stems that look great for months and months rather than flash-in-the-pan effect of floral drama queens. I'm grateful for that education -- it lead me to learn to appreciate the simple, reliable joys of plants like cardoons and bronze fennel.

Somewhere, though, in learning what I "ought" to love I lost track of some of the things I actually love. It turns out that, though I like reliable backdrop plants that look great all year, what I really love is the ephemeral. I WANT my garden to flare up in gorgeous color one day that is gone the next. That's why I live in Michigan. I love spring, and summer and fall, the change, the dynamism. I even love winter – the long peace, the planning, the slowly, tortuously building anticipation that leaves me literally shaking, dancing, laughing with joy when those first crocuses and snowdrops show themselves.

 Steady, reliable performers that don't have an off season are all well and good if you are designed a landscape for a business or park that needs to look good all the time. But I want more in my home garden. I want drama. I want anticipation. I'm happy to accept some ungangly forms or awkward bare spots in exchange for those thrilling, long-awaited moments of sheer perfect unimaginable beauty. The peonies, lilies, tulips, roses, gladiolus, chrysanthemums and all the rest.

I've learned to laugh it off when someone pulls out the tired old line about mature gardeners focusing on foliage rather than flowers. I'm going to plant what I love because I love it, let the designers and experts think what they will. I'd rather be deliriously happy than 'right' any day.

Book Review: The Edible Front Yard by Ivette Soler

Before I opened this book I knew two things: It would be beautiful, and it would be fun. Anyone who has read Ivette's blog, The Germinatrix, would expect the same. Ivette's prose, like her gardens, is unabashed, exuberant, and a rollicking good time. And in terms of visual beauty, even my high expectations were blown away... This book is GORGEOUS. If you have any doubts that vegetables can be beautiful, the lush sensual photographs in this book will change your mind. I want half of them framed.

One of the gorgeous edible gardens in the book... WANT!

I was curious, though, on the practical front. This is a book about growing beautiful fruits and vegetables as an integrated part of a front yard display garden. Ivette knows her stuff, but she lives in Southern California, while I live in Michigan. Would anything actually apply to me in my garden?

Practical How-To

The first thing I did was flip to the practical sections – Chapters 6 through 10 go over the mechanics of planning, hardscaping, maintaining, and harvesting an edible ornamental garden. I had no need to be worried. The principles covered are solid, fundamental, and universal. Beginning gardeners will still need a good local book (or wise mentor) to school you in the vagaries of your particular climate, but this book covers most of the basics, and helps you know what questions you need to ask about where you garden now.

Beyond the usual talk of irrigation, compost, and harvest, I was thrilled to find detailed information for DIY hardscaping. Lovely paths, patios, and raised beds are a key part of any ornamental garden, edible or not, but so many garden design books simply assume you'll be hiring someone else to install them. Ivette recognizes that not everyone has that kind of budget, and gives great, clear, economical instructions on doing it yourself. I'm inspired now, and this summer I am finally putting in that patio I've been wanting!

In the garden maintenance chapter, I had minor quibbles with the confusion of the terms “chemical” and “synthetic” (organic fertilizers are still chemicals) and the assumption that everything organic is safe. My only major concern is that she doesn't address lead contamination. The soil near older homes and roads are frequently contaminated with lead from old lead paint and the exhaust from leaded gasoline. Before you plant anything you are going to eat in a hell strip or next to your house, GET A SOIL TEST. Lead poisoning is a serious risk, especially for children.

Designing the garden

The true brilliance of this book, however, is the chapters on design. Design is a very hard thing to teach. So many designers work by instinct, on a subconscious level, and can't really explain HOW they create the things they do. In my experience, books on design tend to be too specific (Plant in threes or fives ALL the time!) or too vague (Do what makes you happy!) or get bogged down in silly, artificial discussions of nonsensical things like the “color wheel” that don't really apply to how anyone I know actually designs a garden (or anything else for that matter)

Pretty, but I don't think it actually MEANS anything...

I should have known Ivette would get it right. She guides you through considering your personal style, the look of your house, your neighborhood, and your city to create a garden that evokes the feel you want. One specific suggestion that I am TOTALLY going to start using, is called a mood board – basically using a cork board to brain-storm colors, textures, plants, and hardscaping. Maybe designer-types all have heard of this, but it is new to me, and I love it.

A great example of Ivette's way of teaching design is her take on the much-discussed rules of how many of each plant to use. She explains how different numbers work visually, then ends with perhaps the most perfect “rule” I've ever heard: “Play – but play with big numbers”

That is the tone of this entire book – Ivette gives you the basic guidelines and concepts you need to be successful, and then points you to developing the personal, creative style that you will enjoy and reflects your individuality.

In short, this is a terrific, gorgeous, book about growing ornamental vegetables – but at its heart, it is a spectacular, inspiring book on garden design -- of any kind. Even if you have no interest in growing food, you should read this book. It will inspire you to be a better designer, and the absolutely gorgeous shots of artichokes, chard, and purple-leaf basil will probably convince you to grow them even if you don't like how they taste.

Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book for free to review.

Friday Cartoon: Color Contrast

I love winter. I love snow. A lot. This is one of the reasons why.

My Top 5 Gardening Books

Genevieve is asking garden bloggers to list their top 5 gardening books -- just in time for winter book season!


Here is my list: 


The Explorer's Garden by Dan Hinkley
There are actually two of these -- one on perennials, one on shrubs and vines. Both are amazing, but I have a personal love for the first one, on perennials, because that was the book I stumbled upon as a beginning gardener who grew nothing but roses (for SOME insane reason) and that book opened up for me this whole other universe of growing, loving and collecting plants. To me, this book contains the magical essence of gardening as a passion, as a way of life. 


Gardening on Pavement, Tables, and Hard Surfaces by George Schenk
Okay. Just read that title. What? Gardening on tables? Hard surfaces? What does it mean? Don't get this book from the library, but buy your own copy, because it will blow your mind right out of your nose and all over the page, and librarians frown on this. Container gardening without the container. Floating table top gardens. Lawn you can roll up like a carpet. 


My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid
This book takes you right inside Jamaica Kincaid's mind while she gardens, and what you find there is a wild, exhilarating, poetic, funny, moving, swirl of images, stories, ideas, plants, and places. Which is a terrible description, but this book is indescribable. And wonderful.


A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein
The subtitle to this book is "Towns Buildings Construction." So... why is it in my list of top gardening books? Because good design is good design, and these principles are universal. An example: I just flipped my copy open at random, and this is what I read: "Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic or 'natural' or 'modern art' or 'plants' or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life -- the things you care for, the things that tell your story." There are over a thousand pages of truths like that. Go dig in. You'll garden -- and live -- differently for it.


Merry Hall by Beverly Nichols
I've reviewed this book before so I won't say too much, except: This is a must for any gardener. It captures so perfectly the JOY of gardening, the sheer bliss of this most wonderful of passions. 


So that's my list! What are you five favorites?

Friday Cartoon: How to design a garden

Wild flowers: Rudbeckia and rumex

I've talked about the wildflowers along my daily bicycle commute before. Well, right now they are putting on quite a show again. Black eyed susan (Rudbeckia fulgida I think. I'm never sure on rudbeckia species) and behind it the weed, curly dock (Rumex crispus) with a few unidentified grasses mixed in.

 I would never think of letting dock in my garden, but I have to say the brown of the dried seed heads forms an amazing back drop for the rudbeckia flowers. Once again, nature proves to have very sophisticated tastes in design.

Working together

The beds infront of my house are in their second year, and things are starting to come together. I'm particularly fond of this section at the moment:

Here we have my beloved cardoons, fronted with the stunning Allium christophii mixed with bronze fennel. (It suddenly strikes me that this is edible landscaping... not that I could bear to cut and eat any of it, but still. All three are vegetables.)
Believe it or not, when I started planting here last spring, I was planning all hot colors -- red, oranges and yellows accented with purple foliage and a bit of blue. But somehow I started planting silver foliage (because I can't resist cardoons), and I don't like yellow tones with silver, so all the orange and yellows got ripped out. Then I started planting purples and blues, and... I'm liking it. A lot. It will be interesting to see the look evolve as the summer goes on and my Salvia 'Black and Blue' (from tubers I saved from last year) and Crocosmia 'Lucifer' come into flower.

Lawn alternative of the day

I love this hell-strip planting on street with otherwise completely uninteresting front lawns. It is simply masses of violets (why do some people call them weeds?) and a small creeping sedum (of unknown identity -- anyone care to take a stab at IDing it?).

Here is a close up:

I love it -- simple, zero maintenance, and looks terrific.

Living room Garden

My friend Virginia sent me photos the other day of a planting we did two years ago at the Ohio State Learning Gardens. When we were both students, we worked in the gardens together, and started a tradition of whimsical, furniture-based plantings.

This is what we did for 2008:

Coleus on the couch watching TV next to the Canna Grandfather clock

Begonia end table and more of the couch

Virginia herself, relaxing on the sedum-ajuga rug next to the thyme chair.

Last year we were both too busy to do a planting, but we're getting ready to do one for this year come May!

Winter Color Revisited

The snow is finally melting, and all of us Northern gardeners are giddy with joy, and we're all posting about the very same set of plants: Snowdrops, crocuses, witch hazel and helleborus.

Except me.

This post is about an entirely different set of plants.

Back in December I took a stroll through the gardens at Michigan State, and wrote about plants for winter color -- so I thought I would revisit those plants now, and see what I'm thinking.

Some things are decidedly out: The ornamental kale now looks like this:

And smells like rotten cabbage. Yuck. Yuck. Ugh. These might be good plants for a milder climate, but this is NOT what I want to see when the snow first melts.
Another looser are the deciduous hollies -- they looked stunning in December, but every berry is now long gone. They are nice for fall/early winter, but don't go the distance to early spring -- and the same is true of every other berry in the gardens. They simply don't last long enough to qualify for real winter interest.

The winners:

Yucca filamentosa 'Color Guard'

This is amazing color anytime -- but for March in Michigan, it is unbelievable. Looks just as bright as it did in the fall.

Sedum rupestre 'Angelina'

The it a LOT of color for something that was under 6 inches of snow just a couple days ago! And wouldn't it be stunning with deep purple crocuses coming up through it?

I'm also still loving: This ornamental grass (whatever it is... I should know, but I'm terrible with my grasses. ID anyone?)

And Sedum 'Autumn Joy' (even though it IS over used, I'm impressed with how it stands up to the amount of snow we get here)

So I'm starting to put together a winter/early spring garden in my head: A backdrop of evergreen conifers, a swath of ornamental grass, and red-twig dogwood, lots of Yucca 'Color Guard' fronted with 'Autumn Joy' and 'Angelina' peppered with splashes of purple crocus and dwarf iris. Wouldn't that be marvelous? What would you add?

Photos of ideas 3: Happy topiary

I apologize for the truly wretched quality of this picture, but I can't resist sharing it:

Do you see the little topiary bear, his arms raised as if he's jumping for joy, tucked back in the middle of all the other shrubs? This is a picture of the growing field of a nursery in Japan that sells shrubs, most of which have been sculpted into some shape or the other. I love this particular image because it reminds me to be a little fun and silly in the garden. Too often I get so obsessed with creating the "perfect" design I forget to be a little goofy. I need to tuck more joyous bears in my garden this year.

Photos of ideas 2: Rainlilies

This is a picture of yard of a house I walked past in Shikoku, Japan while visiting my friend Reiko's family:

Like so many Japanese gardens, this one is full of graceful, understated beauty. The rain lilies (Zephyranthes) dotted randomly in the grass, the simple stepping stones... I love it. This photo inspires me to rethink my "lawn" areas. I've never been a big lawn person, but this is the sort of lawn I do like -- simple green background to randomly dot flowers in. But how do you do that practically? What about mowing? I'm not sure how they manage it in this yard, but I'm trying to make a space for this sort of look by replacing part of my grass with moss. I'm also considering replacing my grass in sunnier areas with a dwarf blue grass, or maybe short "no mow" fine fescue both from High Country Gardens. Without the need for mowing, I could mix all sorts of bulbs and small perennials into my lawn...

Photos of ideas

A lot of the pictures I take are of ideas: Bits of design, combinations of plants -- cool stuff I want to remember to play with in my own garden. And half the time I never go back to those pictures and actually DO anything with them. Blogging projects are always a good way to make me actually do something I've long been thinking about, so I'm going to do a series of posts with photos that represent some cool gardening idea to me.

 To start off: This image I took in the summer of 2005 when I was working as an intern at a nursery in Saitama, Japan.

 (Do click on the image to view it full size -- it is better that way)
This garden is in front of a small, neighborhood shrine, and perfectly creates the quiet, restful, sacred atmosphere appropriate for this space. If I was gardening this space, I think I would be tempted to throw in variegated foliage, or a few slashes or flowers -- but the restrained colors really work, and play up the gorgeous contrasts in texture. And the stone trough it just about perfect -- again, simple, but not boring. Just enough decoration, the color nicely matching the stones set around it. As you can only sort of see in this picture, it is filled with still water, which I love. No trickling waterfall or fountain -- just placid water.

Best of all, like so many Japanese gardens, this one is tiny, and so could easily translate to the smallest yard. I want to create a small, peaceful, sacred nook like this in my garden. I just need to figure out where.

Window sill make-over, part 2

As I have been talking about, I have a goal of redesigning the inside of my house as a garden.

This past weekend, I tackled the long window in the living room:

It is a fairly narrow window sill, with a couch right in front of it -- so about my only option would be a row of little pots all along the windowsill. Which seemed... lame. A whole bunch of little pots would be silly looking, and the windowsill isn't wide enough to make them really stable. I'd have to end up buying nice looking ceramic ones, which the cats would end up knocking off and breaking.

I explained my quandry to my extremely handy partner. He's not a plant person, but he knows building things. We took a little trip to the local home improvement warehouse, and hey presto, he made me this:

 

A water-proof metal tray, to make watering mess-free, faced with a piece of trim, so when you put plants in there, you don't see the (cheap, plastic) pots, just the greenery -- and it cost a total of about $10. (Yes, I know how lucky I am to have him.)
The planted up result looks like this:

Which I am pretty happy about. I'm in love with the planter box -- makes even this fairly uninspired combination of random plants I had around (mostly Ficus pumila, plus the odd aeonium, kalanchoe and philodendron) look pretty nice. I'm also planning, next winter, to force a lot of small bulbs (dwarf iris, crocus, etc) in 4 inch pots, so I can slip them in between the trailing fig as they come into bloom. Some small cyclamen would look good too (and yes, I keep my house very cool, so they'll be happy) if I can find some that aren't magenta. Magenta, fuchsia, and all allied screaming purply-pink colors are absolutely NOT allowed in my garden, inside or out.

Anyone have other ideas of good plants for this spot? They need to be fine with an east-facing window, not too big, and ideally winter flowering -- and NOT magenta.Oh, and don't say african violets. Way too cold in the house for gesneriads. They live in my overheated office at work/school.

Gardening inside

Here is a time line of the events leading up to today's post. (photos are of most of the windows in my house. The reason for that will become apparent.)

1/15/2010: Carol, as always, hosts Bloom Day. Bloggers in cold areas everywhere complained they had no flowers because it was January and posted pictures of lampshades and chairs instead.

1/17/2010: Mr. Subjunctive posts a rant about the lack of winter blooms stating that: "Winter is not an excuse. It never was. Now go buy an African violet before February 15 or I will come to your blog and kick your ass."

1/20/2010, 8:16 am: I do my weekly "Wednesday Links" post, including a link to Mr. Subjunctive's rant, and make a sort of half-hearted promise to order a lazy cop-out collection of random winter flowering house plants.

1/20/2010, 9:17 am: Mr. Subjunctive comes to my blog and writes a comment. A very long comment. Actually, I think it is so long it technically qualifies as a guest post, in which he details some winter flowering house plants he does and does not recommend.

1/20/2010, 5:00 pm, heading home from work: Hit by a double dose of full strength Mr. Subjunctive, I finally start really thinking about his point and ask myself this question: Why DON'T I treat the inside of my house as just as much a garden as the outside?

1/20/2010, 7:00pm, after dinner: I start getting excited. Way too excited. I look at my pitiful windowsills (which basically are refugee camps for things from last years outdoor garden that I'm hoping will pull through until spring) and start having visions of lush, well-designed gardens of contrasting foliage textures and rich, fragrant displays of winter flowers.

1/20/2010, 9:00pm: I have filled several pages of my notebook with ideas for windowsill gardens. My list of plants to buy starts getting longer. I take "before" pictures of all the windows in the house. My long-suffering partner asks what on earth I am doing, and is subjected to a 20-minute exposition on my rapturous conversion to the cult of indoor gardening.

1/21/2010: I sit in my office at school supposedly writing a paper, but really googling things like: billbergia, trailing african violets and philodendron. I call my partner to tell him we're going to an orchid show this weekend.

So that is the story. I'm going nuts. I'm determined that next winter will be full of lovely and interesting things to post about and enjoy. We'll see how it turns out. By the way, Mr. S.: You need to make more lists. Specifically, I need a list of: House plants with frilly/ferny/fluffy foliage. Also: Plants with a viny, trailing, weepy growth habit. Not to mention: Plants with dark purple/red/maroon foliage. Oh! And things with fragrant flowers. Not to, like, tell you how to do your job or anything, but still. I'd like to see those lists.

November in the windy City

I just got back from 4 days in chicago for an incredibly awsome conference on Darwin (on the off chance that any of you are evolutionary biology nerds, I'll just say Richard Lewontin, Ronald Numbers, Marc Hauser, Doug Schemske, Jerry Coyne and Daniel Dennett, and let you drool all over your key boards)

While there, of course, I had to visit them amazing Lurie Garden in Millennium park, designed by the great Piet Oudolf. It is a revelation -- now I have absolutely no excuse for letting my garden break down into nothingness by November. I've always been skeptical about ornamental seed heads and such, but no longer. The browns of the grasses, almost black rudbeckia seed heads, and rich yellow amsonia... amazing.

Who knew November could be so lovely?